Human Development

Jul 16, 2026 Iryna Volnytska

AI is often portrayed as a threat to higher education, with some administrators and professors focused on rooting out its use. But this approach fails to recognize that, in an AI-transformed world, the new dividing lines are technical capabilities and institutional pipelines that can quickly transform research into products.

KYIV—Just as French aristocrats under the ancien régime could hardly imagine the abolition of their noble titles, most of today’s university leaders cannot conceive of a world in which the degrees they confer become worthless pieces of paper. The former were in for a rude awakening in 1790; the latter are barreling toward a similar shock.